Full Description
Keorapetse Kgositsile, South Africa's second poet laureate, was a political activist, teacher, and poet. He lived, wrote, and taught in the United States for a significant part of his life and collaborated with many influential and highly regarded writers, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Plumpp, Dudley Randall, and George Kent. This comprehensive collection of Kgositsile's new and collected works spans almost fifty years.
During his lifetime, Kgositsile dedicated the majority of his poems to people or movements, documenting the struggle against racism, Western imperialism, and racial capitalism, and celebrating human creativity, particularly music, as an inherent and essential aspect of the global liberation struggle. This collection demonstrates the commitment to equality, justice, and egalitarianism fostered by cultural workers within the mass liberation movement. As the introduction notes, Kgositsile had an "undisputed ability to honor the truth in all its complexity, with a musicality that draws on the repository of memory and history, rebuilt through the rhythms and cadences of jazz." Addressing themes of Black solidarity, displacement, and anticolonialism, Kgositsile's prose is fiery, witty, and filled with conviction. This collection showcases a voice that wanted to change the world—and did.
Contents
Editors' Note: In the Original . . .
Introduction in Two Movements
Spirits Unchained (1969)
To Gloria
For LeRoi Jones, April, 1965
When Brown Is Black
Brother Malcolm's Echo
Mandela's Sermon
Elegy for David Diop
Ivory Masks in Orbit
Lumumba Section
Spirits Unchained
To Fanon
Song for Aimé Césaire
My Name Is Afrika
For Spellman at Spelman
I Am Music People
Origins
For Melba (1970)
And the Long Story
Song for Melba
mmabatho: Dakar, 1966
The Creator
Indeed in Deed
For Those Who Love & Care
True Blue
Of Death and Lives
Death Doses
Death Doses No. 2
Death Doses No. 3
My People When Nothing Moves
Come Duze
3000 Miles Apart
Of Us for Us
In Time
By A. B. Inspired
Tropics
For Melba
My Name Is Afrika (1971)
The Air I Hear
Impulse
Shotgun
Mayibuye iAfrika
Could Be
Random Notes to My Son
To Mother
My People No Longer Sing
To a Black Woman, Insane
To My Daughter
Sift and Shift
Vector or Legacy
Bleached Callouses, Africa, 1966
The Lip Trick
The Nitty-Gritty
Time
New Dawn
Inherent and Inherited Mistrusts
Symptoms
Flirtation
Conditioned
Innuendo
Axiomatic
Bandung Dance
For Afroamerica
No Celebration
In the Nude
Of Yesterday's Tomorrows
Epitaph
Like the Tide: Cloudward
No Tears in the Tide
Towards a Walk in the Sun
The Spearhead Wind Strides
The Gods Wrote
The Long Reach
The New Breed
For Eusi, Ayi Kwei & Gwen Brooks
Recreation
Point of Departure: Fire Dance Fire Song
I. The Elegance of Memory
II. Lumumba Section
III. Fire Dance
IV. Spirits Unchained
For Sons of Sonless Fathers
Notes from No Sanctuary
The Present Is a Dangerous Place to Live (1974, 1993)
For Ipeleng
The Present Is a dangerous Place to Live . . . One
I. In the Mourning
II. Beware of Dreams
III. Without Shadow
IV. Mirrors, without Song
Mystique
There Are No Sanctuaries except in Purposeful Action . . . Two
1.
2. When Things Fall Apart
3. Exile
4. Perception
5. Logistics
. . . Three
Blues for Some Literary Friends & Myself
Home Is Where the Music Is . . . Four
For Billie Holiday
For Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers
For B. B. King and Lucille
Acknowledgement
Pro/Creation
For Hughie Masekela
Places and Bloodstains (1975)
Requiem for My Mother
Epitaph for Can Themba
For Gwigwi
For TW
For Otis Redding
Here We Are Like the Present
Letter to Skunder
For Zeke and Dennis
For Cecil Abrahams
After Mongane
Son of Mokae
Song for Ilva Mackay and Mongane
For Montshiwa & Phetoe
Open Letter
Places and Bloodstains
Heartprints (1980)
Letter to Ipeleng on Her Birthday 1976
When the Clouds Clear (1990)
The Long Arm of the Blues
The Same Strip of Land
Rites of Passage
Dance
Morning in Tunis
Sharper Than Any Blade You Know
Bleeding Red
Luthuli Detachment
When the Clouds Clear
Red Song
From Now On. . . .
For Olinka
An Injury to One Is an Injury to All
Every Patriot a Combatant
Quest
Kate
June 16 Year of the Spear
Chimid: A Memorial
Seaparankoe
Here You Almost Started
A Luta Continua
New Age
Manifesto
South Africa Salutes Uzbekistan
To the Bitter End (1995)
Coil of Time
What Time Is It?
In the Wheeling and Dealing Time
Rites of Passage: (1991)
Dumalisile
I Am
Manboy
When the Deal Goes Down
Years without Tears
Strange Rituals
Grand Papa Dhlomo
For David Rubadiri
For Bra Ntemi
Fidelity
Montage: Bouctou Lives
Heart to Heart
We Are All Involved
Even Skin Disappears
If I Could Sing (2002)
Recollections
Venceremos
Affirmation
Memorial
If I Could Sing
Renaissance
Rejoice
This Way I Salute You (2004)
For Johnny Dyani
Santamaria
Cassandra Wilson Will Sing
Where Her Eye Sits
eThekwini
For Gloria Bosman
For Our Mother of the Heavy Names
Homesoil in My Blood (2018)
No Boundaries
No Serenity Here
Letter from Havana
In the Naming
Anguish Longer Than Sorrow
Wounded Dreams
I Am No Stranger
We Are All Involved (2012)
Of Shadows and Chameleons
Festive Heart
I Know a Few Things
New Day
For Fernando, Gloria, Eduardo and the 2012 Team
For Sterling Plumpp
For Hu Xiancheng
Uncollected (1971)
Carbon-Copy Whiteman or Sexual Refugee
The Awakening
Manifesto (1971)
'Yes, Mandela, We Shall Be Moved'
Fruitful Seed (1971)
Freedom Train, 1965
Introduction to a Future History Book
Source Acknowledgments
